4 thoughts on “Edgy and nano: You mean nano -w, don’t you?”

Sorry, I should have been more precise. It seems nano under Edgy (and I only say that because I didn’t seem to have this problem in Dapper or Breezy) defaults to wrap lines that extend past the right-hand screen border. As soon as you break a line with a new space, nano shifts down to the next line, sort of like a word processor would — that’s the “hideous arc.”

The problem is, if you write out the file like that, it doesn’t re-concatenate those lines. So something like, for example, an fstab file (which is very long and clumsy now that the UUID numbers are part of it) that needs to be a long straight sequence to be read properly, becomes clipped or just built wrong.

The -w option prevents nano from wrapping, and avoids miswriting those files when you’re editing them. A minor change, and probably not worth all the fuss I made over it.🙂